Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 24, 2011

Blogger to Integrate With Google+

When you edit your Blogger profile, Blogger shows a message at the top of the page that says: "Connect Blogger to Google+: Use your Google profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger". Unfortunately, the links seem to be broken, but both URLs reference profile switching.

It's obvious that Blogger profiles will be discontinued and replaced by Google Profiles, but it's not clear how Blogger will integrate with Google+. Maybe Blogger posts will automatically trigger Google+ posts and Blogger/Google+ comments will be synchronized. Friend Connect will be discontinued and Google+ could replace it. Friend Connect's goal was to "help site owners easily provide social features for their visitors. Users gain the ability to sign in to, make friends on, and interact with your site, making it more social and more dynamic". It wasn't successful, but Google+ has a better chance to make Blogger more social.

Update: Blogger's blog informs that this option is available if you use Blogger in Draft and it will be released in the regular Blogger interface in the coming weeks. For now, the only changes are that the Blogger profile redirects to the Google profile, the author's name is now obtained from Google Profiles and Google's snippets for the blog posts include information about authors: name, thumbnail and link to the profile. "If you blog under a pseudonym and do not want your blog to be associated with your real name, you should not migrate from a Blogger profile to a Google+ profile," suggests Google. If you change your mind after switching to the Google+ profile, you can revert to the Blogger profile.

any improvement on blogger is okay... but i just hope that the blogger team will focus on emulate what WordPress have done... blogger should overcome WordPress because they are Google for god sake ....

How about them using G+ to allow threaded conversations - and notifications of replies - to comments? The commenting system on Blogger is a joke, and has never really been updated to make it viable or worthwhile.

Yet I still haven't updated to Echo or Livefyre or anything else, hoping Google would do something with it.

If there's true convergence then what is the need to differentiate blogger from google+? Right now the difference is that blogger allows richer content and more user control over look and feel than the very limited g+ posts. Also blogs are more discoverable under standard google web searches but that will probably change for the better for g+.

@Anonymous - apps users are coming to Google+ in the next 2 weeks. It was announced at web 2.0 summit last week by Vic Gundotra. He said it was a massive undertaking they did not expect to connect google apps users.

I like the idea of integrating my Blogger and G+ profile. It's about time they trash FriendConnect. I just hope Google builds some good widgets like they had with FriendConnect so you can show off circles, Google+ activities, stream activity etc.

I'd personally prefer that you at least have the option not to link the two. I use Google+ as Me, I use Blogger as a way to stay in touch with readers and fans for my Pen Names from all my writing. I would cancel and close blogger completely as soon as I realize this is happening. I wouldn't have a choice because it would either be that or lose the anonymity.

Even though I already have a Google+ account and two Google+ brand pages, I won't be using it juts yet ... I think Google+ is far from being as attractive as Facebook, but it is a nice thing that they progress while also learning ...

So Google+Blogger integration is a nice addition to gain more accounts though Blogger's huge user pool ...